engl661fandomcom-20200213-history
Edward Said
Said (pages 1861-1888) Brief Biography Edward Said was born in 1935 in the British-ruled Jerusalem, Palestine. He was educated in both British and American colonial schools in Cairo. After being expelled from school in 1951 for "disciplinary reasons," Said attended a prep school in Massachusetts (Norton 1861). While there, he was able to receive his U.S. citizenship and apply to U.S. Universities. He went on to attend Princeton for his B.A. and Harvard for his M.A. and Ph.D. in English and comparative literature. Starting his academic career at Columbia, he played a number of different prestigious roles and was a visiting professor for a multitude of other Ivy League/High Rank universities. 1935-2003 Background/historical context Orientalism was published in 1978, a time when the turmoil between the Middle East and the West was intensifying. Moreover, in the introduction to Said in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism it is noted that the creation of the Jewish state of Israel was not seen as the reclamation for those living in the Middle East that the West portrayed it to be. The Palestinians referrer to it as nakbah, for "disaster," while the West celebrates it as the healing reestablishment of the Jewish homeland. Said himself is quoted as saying, "Israel was established; Palestine was destroyed" (1861). Key Words (list) Orientalism: "a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European's Western experience" (1866). The Occident: "the dominant West" (1861). The Orient: "the Middle and Far East" (1861). Orientalized: the idea that the Orient was created (1868) Strategic Location: a way of describing the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about (1881) Strategic Formation: a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way which groups of texts acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large (1881). Key Quotes (list) "Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been considerable material investment" (1870). "The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other" (1866). "The nexus of knowledge and power creating 'the Oriental' and in a sense obliterating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter" (1887). "The imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western conciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, amd projections" (1871). "It Orientalism is rather a distribution ''of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an ''elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of 'interests' which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it now only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct/ corresponding relationship with political power in the raw' but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what 'we' do and what 'they' cannot do or understand as 'we' do)" (1875). In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in ) any occasion when that peculiar entity 'the Orient' is in question" (1868). Analysis/Interpretation Said is saying the idea of the Orient and Orientalism and the Occident's sense of both is created through literary endeavors. He states that since we live in an "electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed" (1886). Western cultures are not taking into serious consideration the different cultures that make up the Orient and are subscribing to a set of ideas that have been created for them. Said believes the Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from archetypes that perceive all “Eastern” societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to “Western” societies. This consequent knowledge establishes “the East” as antithetical to “the West.” Said's arguments rely heavily on a single conceit, " . . . no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author's involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances" (1874). His point is that there is no such thing as true objectivity; every person brings themselves into everything they read, write, create, study, etc. Included in this "self" is the individuals placement in the world. Where Marxist theory might be most concerned with an individual's place within a certain class structure, Said is interested in the literal geography that person inhabits and how this colors every bit of knowledge they absorb and/or produce. It seems that Said is going beyond addressing the issues with "Orientalism" and the "Orient" in more than a few ways. One particular way in which he positions this concept is by looking at the representation of power, which is seen as the Western cultures, and those who are lesser in power or power-less, which is how the East is viewed. What I found very interesting about his work is the idea of representation by the Orientalist of the Orient. Said writes "Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies...Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders it mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact" (pg. 1882). Another quote later on that same page sums up this idea, "The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelty to some great original. The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient" (Pg. 1882). I really felt that this aspect of his argument encompassed issues that are very relevant even modernly. Since, I believe, the Orient is the same as the Othered people present day, these quotes could not be more true. I find that many times those who are not in the shoes of the experiencer try to speak for their experience. I have often wondered if it would do more justice to the East, or Orient, or Other, if authors were to help those who do not have a voice to have a voice by writing their story or experience from their point of view, with the information gathered from that experiencer, in order to reveal an actual look into their lives free from the influence of Western culture. Related Class Texts/Objects Karl Marx - Like Marx, Said's theories are partially based on the relationship between a dominating cultural and political force and the subject of this domination. The key difference is that while Marx focused on the manifestation of this phenomena in class structures, Said is interested in how the Occident (the West), exerts dominance and control over the Orient (the East). Major criticisms One major criticism of Said's work is the fact that he does not discuss women or gender. According to The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Susan Fraiman published an article entitled "Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism," in Critical Inquiry 21 (1995) where she criticizes Said for not acknowledging texts written by women and also for ignoring gender all together in his work (1865). 1) Harvard Professor Emeritus Roger Owen expressed that while Said's work has received a mixed reception, it is important to read "Orientalism as carefully as its author would wish and then being able to understand its role as the first part of a project which required the construction of alternative methodologies as its complement." Owen said that he and some—not many—of his colleagues, "experienced a great sense of relief. After a decade or so of critique, our work had been overtaken and summed up by Edward in such a comprehensive way that, so it then appeared, we could all get on with what seemed the much more important task of finding better ways of studying the economies, societies, and political systems of the Middle East" (Owen). 2) Owen also recognized that when regarding the immediate reception of Edward’s work, "it was not only many Orientalists, or near-Orientalists, who were upset but also many well-versed in what they regarded as a progressive science of society. This certainly applied to persons such as Harry Magdoff, the New York editor of the Monthly Review, who asked me to review Orientalism, a book about which he had very mixed feelings. It was also true of colleagues such as Fred Halliday, who argued that Orientalism could easily be read as creating an irreconcilable division between East and West, thereby undermining one of the basic features of our universalistic approach" (Owen). References Simon, Peter, editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Owen, Roger. "Edward Said and the Two Critiques of Orientalism." Middle East Institute. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2016.